


Every Winner Has Scars

by karatam



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Golden Trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-12
Updated: 2011-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-25 23:18:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karatam/pseuds/karatam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scars tell a story, a history of what once was, indelible and undeniable unlike the words in a book. But the words written in the skin of Harry and Hermione are ones that Ron would rather forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Winner Has Scars

His skin is clean.

It’s pale and freckly and smattered with dirt and dust, but it’s clean.

There are no blemishes.

And for him, that marks him as different. Separate. Other.

Because the ones he loves most are scarred.

Their stories are told in their skin, etched into their flesh by those who hurt them. On paper, stories can be rewritten. Facts can be revised. History can be changed. The story told in the newspaper is not what actually happened; it’s watered down for the general public. It does not tell of the smell of burnt skin or the agony of pure pain racing up the spine when a curse flies across the room or the feeling of watching the death of someone loved.

Someone missed.

People don’t want to read of such things. They want to forget the horrors, move the attention to the heroes, the survivors. To honour the dead without looking too closely at how they got that way. They want to change the story into a legend, because legends are much cleaner than the truth.

And Ron is one of those legends now, forced to smile awkwardly in front of the cameras with the new Minister of Magic’s arm draped heavily over his shoulders. Flashbulbs explode, he’s blinded by light and he wishes he could be anywhere else.

He wishes he could be holed up in his bedroom with Harry and Hermione, playing wizard’s chess, avoiding homework and laughing.

They haven’t laughed in days, maybe weeks.

Eventually, Ron tires of the lines of exhaustion edging Hermione’s eyes and the near paranoid twitches Harry is developing and he puts his foot down. In the middle of a press conference, he grabs both their hands and Apparates to Shell Cottage. Bill and Fleur are at the Burrow, so there isn’t a person around for miles.

None of them speak as Ron gets the fire started or as Hermione carefully makes a pot of tea and sets it on the table. Harry just stares into the flames, the flickering light casting shadows across his face. They’re all full of shadows. Ghosts of a childhood spent fighting one of the greatest evils the wizarding world has ever known, a task that should never have had to been their burden.

Ron watches as Hermione absently rubs the skin of her forearm, fingertips slipping over the ridges of the word etched there. He can still hear her screams echoing in his head. He’s not sure they will ever go away.

They had gone to see Madame Pomfrey as soon as they could, but one look at her face when she saw the scar and they knew nothing could be done. Hermione would bear the mark for the rest of her life. A permanent reminder of what she had been through.

“Mudblood.”

Bellatrix Lestrange always went for the pain before the kill.

Just as he tears his eyes away from Hermione’s arm, Harry raises his hand to push back a lock of his unruly hair. Ron’s breath catches in his throat because Harry bears scars both new and old.

The words carved into the back of his hand, by a teacher of all people. Not even a lieutenant of Voldemort, but a person who just enjoyed the feeling of power over children. Thinking of Umbridge still makes Ron almost sick to his stomach. And the bloody woman made Harry do the writing himself, which just makes it worse.

“I shall not tell lies.”

The words are a symbol of how even those who should be trusted can sometimes be just as corrupt and rotten to the core as the enemy.

And then there is that lightning bolt scar. The one that started the three of them down this path so many years ago.

The one given to Harry by the man who would hunt him for seventeen years. The one that resulted in the deaths of all the family Harry had ever known. The one that marked him as different to everyone who has met him from the day he turned eleven. The one that gave him a glimpse into the mind of a madman.

The one that very nearly sentenced him to death.

Ron startles the other two when he stands suddenly and leaves the room, walking into the bathroom and twisting the lock behind him. He stares into the mirror on the wall for a long time, searching his skin for some sign, some outward indication of the hell he has been through with and for the people he loves.

He sees nothing.

And then he looks at his eyes and there they are, the scars he bears.

He hasn’t cried since Fred died, slamming a wall down between him and his emotions because they need him, his family and friends. Harry and Hermione need him to not fall apart, though they would never ask that of him. He hasn’t cried, but the tears are there, waiting behind his eyelids.

The world he knew, the one he was born into, the only one he has ever known, has been changed forever. The very landscape bears the scars of the war, spells and curses gouging ravines in the earth, levelling houses and entire villages. And as much as Harry and Hermione have adopted this world, they have another one to fall on, just in case. They have the relatively untouched Muggle world to escape to, one untouched by Voldemort and the war. Ron does not have that; the wizarding world is all he knows, and each scar cuts him to the core.

What’s more is that it’s Ron’s own world that has marked Harry and Hermione’s skin, curses digging into them in a way that would never happen in the Muggle world. It’s his world that has scarred them.

But it has scarred him too, in ways that no one but the three of them will ever know. They have been fighting this war for seven years, long before anyone else would even acknowledge it was happening. They have seen and faced things that others can only imagine and it has stripped them of their innocence too soon. They will never be children again.

Ron’s scars aren’t on his skin, his flesh is clean. But his heart, his soul, is just as hurt as Harry’s or Hermione’s. Their deepest wounds aren’t visible to the eye, but buried within them.

In that, they all match.

A trio until the end.


End file.
